You're phrasing this almost as if Niantic wanted there to be third-party mapping apps in the first place, and then changed its mind.
The game Niantic released doesn't have mapping, and didn't intend to have an open API. This can be read as an implicit statement that the game design that Niantic thought people would enjoy playing, doesn't involve knowing where pokemon are.
Presuming there was at least one actual game designer involved in creating the game, there's likely already some sort of effort-reward cycle built into the game that doesn't involve mapping. It might not be one you like playing, but that probably means that you were not the audience Niantic designed (and playability-tested) the game for.
You would think that, but there really isn't. It's easier to see if you load up the game for yourself.
Sure, it's true that Niantic didn't plan or intend for usable maps to exist. But it's also true that the game is effectively unplayable without the maps.
The real winner in this whole situation is Nintendo. Niantic has effectively given their entire userbase over to Nintendo -- and even though Nintendo's doing very little to attract or keep them, they'll probably still get some extra 3DS + game sales as a result.
I don't understand how that follows. How did Niantic give any of its userbase over to Nintendo? Pokemon Go does very little to advance the Nintendo games - there's literally zero upsell involved (or even any cross-advertising).
You could say that the Pokemon Go brand might sell some extra copies of Sun & Moon in November, but I'd argue that the effect runs mostly in the other direction. Pokemon Go was successful because of Nintendo's Pokemon brand. And to at least a degree, that capital is finite (people's appetite for Pokemon-related games is a finite resource, and it's possible that overexposure to Pokemon Go could make them less excited about the upcoming 3DS games).
Niantic's handling of Pokemon Go is driving demand for Pokemon, but not fulfilling it. And some of that unfulfilled demand is going to Nintendo, whose product does deliver a Pokemon experience, and is already sitting in thousands of stores all across America today.
"Sales of Pokémon X and Y, which were first released in October 2013, were up a huge 200 percent compared to their sales in July of last year." -- https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/nintendo-3ds-sales-up-80-y...
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> Pokemon Go does very little to advance the Nintendo games - there's literally zero upsell involved (or even any cross-advertising).
It doesn't have to advertise Nintendo's products, it only has to advertise the brand.
Coca-Cola ads drive demand and sales for Coke, even though they rarely upsell the actual product. Coke advertisements can drive sales without explicitly saying "12 packs are $3.99 at your local Wal*Mart".
The root motivation of the bug was the stressing of the servers by "headless" accounts that existed solely to make mapping software possible. It's unfortunate that they chose to try and combat that activity rather than just understand it's what people wanted and make it less taxing on their server (make a mapping endpoint on an alternate server).
Didn't they though? At the very beginning of the game, you had footprints you could track and use to "hunt" down nearby pokemon. They took it out because it was hurting their servers. Maps allowed similar hunting. I would say that Niantic did in fact, change its mind.
If that was at all a reason for their reticence to create capable ingress mapping tools, it must be doubly so for PGO - a game that will attract many more minor age children than Ingress.
And that's entirely the developer's fault, not the players'.
I mean, I see what you're saying in the "the customer is always right" sense—it's Niantic's problem to solve if the majority of people playing their game want something other than their game.
But suppose Niantic don't care about making billions of dollars from an audience of "everyone", but only intended the game to be interesting to, say, 8-to-14 year olds with lots of time to kill wandering around in their small towns not finding much of anything. I don't think it's valid to criticize Niantic that another audience glommed onto the game that isn't that audience, and then is demanding an experience Niantic didn't intend.
A comparison: there are these cartoons in Japan about little girls being cute. They are marketed to little girls, who are intended to identify with the characters. But for some reason, a lot of grown men watch these shows, although nobody ever marketed the show to them. As you might guess, the grown men want different things from the shows than the intended audience does. And the grown men have a lot more money. But that doesn't mean that the show should change, does it?
Also remember, Pokemon Go is a franchise license. It was likely intended, in part, as a loss-leader marketing experiment for Nintendo to revive the Pokemon brand. Franchise licensees, before anything else, have to serve as good ambassadors for their franchise. Even if that means not making money. To do otherwise is to possibly get your license revoked, and for these franchise-licensed works, the licensed IP is usually 99% of the reason people (both in and out of the intended audience) are paying any attention. Making Pokemon's intended audience want to buy more Pokemon games, isn't necessarily more important a concern to Niantic's businesspeople than making a billion dollars from IAPs is; but it is certainly a more life-or-death concern. It's something that can't be traded away even for great benefit, like regulatory-compliance in a bank, or safety concern in an engineering project.
Add to that the fact that they made it, with a recent update, insanely likely for anything half-decent to simply run or be impossible to catch, and you have a recipe for declining interest in playing and paying to be bored.
But maybe they didn't want it to go fast. Maybe it was supposed to be unfeasible to get a full set in a reasonable amount of time. This doesn't seem too unlikely if they want to implement trading at some point.
All my 10-50CP Pidgeys don't magically get useful by evolving. Though they do give nice XP.
The maps really drove it into overdrive, especially with the presence of "nests", because it allowed people to figure out where they needed to be, and would then congregate there. By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket - don't bother trying to plan or play with any strategy, just wander around aimlessly until your phone buzzes. Who wants to do that?
It's a shame, because at its core there is a compelling scavenger hunt that generated a truly unique social phenomenon, and it's very sad to see Niantic just piss that away. The game just isn't worth putting any effort into - they broke the effort-reward cycle.